A Political Conservative Goes to Berkeley

By Bari Weiss

Sept. 12, 2017

Ben Shapiro is a 33-year-old who supports small government, religious liberty and free-market economics and opposes identity politics, abortion and Donald Trump. He is, in other words, that wildly exotic creature: a political conservative.

You’d think that the cosmopolitan denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area would have encountered a few, if not in the form of an uncle at Thanksgiving, then perhaps in, I don’t know, a field trip down to Orange County. But to judge from the pre-emptive reaction to Mr. Shapiro’s speech scheduled for this Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley, you’d be mistaken.

Last week Paul Alivisatos, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost, sent out a grave letter to students and faculty members. “We are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging,” he wrote, encouraging his readers to avail themselves of campus counseling services. “No one should be made to feel threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe.”

Mr. Alivisatos wasn’t referring to the various threats against Mr. Shapiro that you might imagine would be his chief concern: When the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos visited campus in February, the resulting protests caused $100,000 in damage. This time around, the activist group Refuse Fascism, which has hailed the left-wing extremist antifa movement as “courageous,” has taken the lead in condemning Mr. Shapiro’s speech, calling him a “fascist” on campus fliers and declaring in a Facebook post that his goal was to “spread ugly fascist views dressed up in slick-talking ‘intellectual’ garb.”

The group has organized a rally during Mr. Shapiro’s talk. It’s no wonder the university has promised a “closed perimeter” around the building where he is set to speak and an “increased and highly visible police presence.”

There’s no question that Ben Shapiro loves to provoke college students. He once brought a diaper to a campus speech to offer to “self-indulgent pathetic children who can’t handle anyone with an opposing point of view.” In another, while entertaining a question from a young woman who called for greater sensitivity toward transgender people, he shot back: “If I call you a moose are you suddenly a moose?”

Yet this sharp-tongued Never Trumper was also, according to the Anti-Defamation League, by far the most bullied Jewish journalist of 2016 — quite a distinction when you think about the kind of vitriol that gushed forth this past year on platforms like Twitter. Those attacks came from the alt-right, which called Mr. Shapiro a “Christ killer” and far worse. When his son was born, the trolls called the baby a “newborn cockroach” and suggested that the entire Shapiro family head to the gas chambers.

Let’s hope the protest against this “fascist” who has been the regular target of actual ones doesn’t result in any violence. But the brouhaha over Ben Shapiro is significant not because of what might go down Thursday at Berkeley, but because it is a perfect exhibition of a much broader phenomenon increasingly apparent in the wake of the Charlottesville, Va., demonstrations last month: the sloppy conflation between actual white supremacists and, well, run-of-the-mill conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals whose main beef is with some on the left who seem like they’d rather do without the First Amendment.

What happened at the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville was the real article: a gathering of proud white supremacists, neo-Nazis and fellow travelers brandishing torches and flags and a Dodge Challenger in order to terrify residents, kill a counterprotester and injure 19 others.

Later in August, however, there were long-planned free-speech protests across the country that had nothing to do with that ugly demonstration. Liberty Weekend in the Bay Area was one of them.

The demonstration was organized by the leader of a right-wing group Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, who advertised the event this way: “No extremists will be allowed in. No Nazis, Communist, K.K.K., Antifa, white supremacist, I.E., or white nationalists. This is an opportunity for moderate Americans to come in with opposing views. We will not allow the extremists to tear apart this country. Specifically, Richard Spencer and Nathan Damigo will not be welcome.”

Perhaps one of the reasons Mr. Gibson had to make his intentions so explicit is that in the past his events have attracted just the kind of people who are fans of anti-Semites and racists like Mr. Spencer: the “Western-chauvinist” Proud Boys; the alt-right group Identity Evropa, or I.E., which was founded last year by Mr. Damigo; plus fans of conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.

Mr. Gibson had also assembled a list of speakers that included, according to the group’s Facebook page, only one white male. The others were Hispanic, black, Asian, Samoan and Muslim; two were women. Mr. Gibson himself is half-Japanese.

You wouldn’t have known any of this though, if you’d listened to news reports or politicians, as Matt Labash pointed out in his must-read essay about the event in The Weekly Standard.

Representative Nancy Pelosi called the event “a white supremacist rally” and criticized the National Park Service for giving Patriot Prayer a permit to gather in Crissy Field, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge: “They’re going to give it as a venue to Nazis and white nationalists.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein lent an amen with her own letter to the Park Service voicing her alarm that the park would “be used as a venue for Patriot Prayer’s incitement, hate and intimidation.”

State Senator Scott Wiener called Patriot Prayer an “extremist group,” insisting that it was “not interested in simply exercising free speech” with its event, but rather in creating “a volatile, chaotic, violent tinderbox.”

San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, asked residents to avoid “engaging with members of Patriot Prayer” lest anyone “dignify their message of hate and their mission of division in our city of love of compassion.”

In the end, however, the violence didn’t emanate from Mr. Gibson’s camp, but from antifa groups that showed up to kick some fascist butt. Meantime, Mr. Gibson said things like “moderates have to come together.” Strange words for an accused fascist. But when mainstream politicians are engaging in Reductio ad Hitlerum, should Mr. Gibson’s branding as such come as any surprise?

One of my favorite things on YouTube is the famous 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University. Baldwin wiped the floor with Buckley before the all-white British audience — the yeas outpolled the nays 540 to 160 on the proposition “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

Can anyone doubt that if Buckley tried to argue the same point today he would have been pelted with a cream pie, or shouted down, or surrounded by a police escort or worse? Perhaps he would have just avoided the tiresome indignity by canceling the talk.

Watch it. You’ll be grateful he didn’t.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the site of an event organized by Patriot Prayer. It took place in Crissy Field, not Golden Gate Park.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor and writer in the Times opinion section.